


can i take you out, out to the family tree?

by velavelavela



Series: and the four of us will not betray (no money will shake us) [1]
Category: H.I.V.E. Series - Mark Walden
Genre: Drabble Collection, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Internalized Homophobia, Lovers To Enemies, M/M, adding on as i go along, frenemies to lovers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-25
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:47:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 1,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23843233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/velavelavela/pseuds/velavelavela
Summary: various drabbles from tumblr prompts about max & the furans in varying points in the pre-HIVE timeline
Relationships: Anastasia Furan/Maximilian Nero, Elena Furan/Maximilian Nero, Pietor Furan/Maximilian Nero
Series: and the four of us will not betray (no money will shake us) [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1719550
Comments: 8
Kudos: 5





	1. "you look like an accident"

**Author's Note:**

> this is all focused on the relationships between nero and the furans. ive been honing these headcanons since the seventh grade. thanks

The first time Max saw Raven, really saw her, she was a small assassin with baby hairs plastered to her pale temples. Lean and small, blue eyes very familiar. _You look like an accident_. He could say it correctly now, could twist his tongue around the syllables in correct vocabulary and order.

“You look like an accident,” was one of the first things he said in broken Ukrainian to Elena, years ago, hours after she had pulled a gun from a holster beneath her cocktail dress and knelt beside him behind the counter of the bar. Two strangers brought together by gunfire and knife-throwing. Knife-throwing! As if they were at the fair!

Not strangers, as they would come to know, though, but in the moment it was shelter with the alcohol and Max struggling to understand the Ukrainian around him. Kiev penthouse bar, fish tanks in the floor, but the glass on those was bulletproof and he wondered if the animals, with their big heads and bigger eyes, knew what was happening.

And before all of that, he had been sitting with a tall Ukrainian man talking about stocks and she was gently swishing by. And the fish beneath them floated this way and that in their watery homes. Her heels clicked against the tanks as she skirted the table. She dragged a floating hand across his back, from shoulder to shoulder. He felt it, but it was so familiar that he was left questioning it instead of letting it slide.

The fish were tropical. The colors of their scales glistened different with each movement. It was a constant stimulus in the corner of his eye, and it was nearly too distracting.

You look like an accident.

He had meant to say, _you look like you’ve been injured_. How could he mess up that bad? But Elena clucked her tongue and laughed a very jolly laugh, one that came from the stomach, one that her sister never had the vulnerability to unleash in herself.

This was, of course, after Max had been grazed by a knife on his forearm and Elena had been grazed by a bullet on her thigh. They were both bleeding, and Elena was pressing his periwinkle, embroidered handkerchief that his mother gave to him for his sixteenth birthday to her leg.

“Excuse me?”

“I’m sorry,” he knew that well enough, “I don’t speak Ukrainian—”

“Let’s stick to English, big boy.”

And Raven spoke English in an almost impeccably Furan accent:

“Anastasia sends her regards.”


	2. "do it, i dare you"

It was one of their bigger sexually charged fights, when Anastasia made a snide, drunken remark about something that Max was too hazy to remember, and before long the priceless vase on the side table was shattered on the ground into a few quite large, sharp pieces. And so it was that she climbed over herself and the mauve ottoman to swing down and take one in her palm with a particularly pointed edge and a particularly pale blue chunk of pattern and brandish it like a pocket knife at him, waving it as she stumbled to him and straddled his lap.

“This? This is what you decided to break?”

“I broke no such thing.”

“With your mind no less.”

“With my mind, _Nastya_?”

“I don’t remember.”

A pause.

“Do it, I dare you.”

For Anastasia had pressed the flat of the piece against the meat at Max’s collarbone. She scoffed, tossing it back behind her and rolling off him and back onto the couch, sprawled like a paper doll. This was a mess to clean up in the morning, they both seemed to agree.


	3. "for once, i was wrong"

“Elena,” Max called, “For once, I was wrong.”

She danced into the room, pulling a shawl tight around her gentle frame, “about what?”

Max felt his heart twinge, as it did every time that he saw her, but his love was especially compelled when she was barefoot and lively, twirling and humming, stumbling over her own ankles and falling back into one of his study’s faux leather armchairs.

He almost forgot to respond. This, she noticed.

“What am I right about this time?” She crossed arms, tilting her head back to regard him down her nose, something Max didn’t care much for as it reminded him of her elder sister.

“The auction price range for the blue iguana skin Anastasia wants.”

“So, you _are_ celebrating the holidays with us?”

Max didn’t answer.


	4. "so... can we go eat?"

Pietor and Max sat beside one another on the long sofa. Pietor had a glass of bourbon and was sipping on it delicately, but that adverb would usually in no way describe him. Max knew this, even though this was the first time they had met. It was in one of Anastasia’s penthouses in New York City, of all places, on the fourth Thursday of November, which was American Thanksgiving and the evening before Black Friday, which was what she was really here for— petty theft of bank accounts soon vulnerable. “Just something to pass the time, oh, and my younger brother is coming, so dress nice.”

The city lights outside the floor-to-ceiling windows were like lighthouse beams in the rain and fog that had fallen like a fresh blanket over the skyline. This apartment was pale and tidy, unlike some of the more elaborate places Max had been with Anastasia. No large portraits, flowers (which she loved, he knew this much about her), expensive irreplaceable artifacts, or throws on the pristine seats.

She had disappeared some time ago, leaving her brother and… sometimes-lover-sometimes-business partner in the living room with the tall ceilings. White fans spun overhead, keeping the room cool against the heating’s overwhelming warmth. “One downfall of this place, Max,” Anastasia said in the elevator, “no climate control, whatsoever.”

Max was beginning to sweat regardless of this.

Pietor kept swirling his drink, the ice sphere clinking in the amber fluid against the glass. Max glanced over to see that the condensation was gathering on the surface as well, droplets sliding down onto Pietor’s hand. Max crossed his legs at the ankles, suddenly somewhat insecure about his loafers. Why did he wear loafers? He was being given too much time to think. Max was not an insecure person until he was given too much time to think.

The other man was taller and sturdier than him, but Max almost definitely knew he himself was smarter. Anastasia had commented on how she’d always been the brains of the outfit when they were younger, just the two of them alone on the streets. Pietor may be able to body slam Max, but Max could calculate his way out of it.

The rain began to batter the windows at an angle then, leaving splotches on the panes like dead insects. Max looked over Pietor to examine this, but then Pietor moved to look in Max’s direction, so Max quickly faced forward again.

It seemed like they sat there like this for hours. Maybe it was hours. But then, Anastasia was gliding in and pocketing her keys.

“So…” she started, raising her eyebrows. It was almost as if Anastasia were introducing Max, a fiancée, to her father instead of Max, definitely not a fiancée or anywhere close, to her baby brother.

“Can we go eat?” Pietor asked quickly to break a settling silence. Max breathed relief at the notion that Pietor felt as awkward as Max did.


	5. prompt: "bones and the stories they tell" title: "osteomancy"

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a poem study of anastasia furan

so it is that you bury it behind the shed, and when you're digging rivets into the iceground, you say "i'm sorry, it is not my fault you are hurt, it is not my fault that those bones've grown tongues to talk to you with, i don't know how to cause anything but pain" so you dig and dig and the plow scrapes sun and sleeps:

*

scryer, scryer what have you done?

the ivory keys, the withering sun--

the blooming song so seldom sung,

the ladder you climb rung by rung,

til the ladder you climb is a ladder you’ve clumb,

and the child of your sister withers to crumbs

the child of your mother is now a son

you do and become,

you're done

and undone,

still as a gun, the life of some small things, because, what's "become" MEAN, what do bones tell once they're stonefruit, again with the thrum of the pulse in my body the pulse up my front and i'll know what is known, and i'll know what's "become"

*

ONCE IT IS ALL OVER YOU BURN LIKE JOAN AND THE TERROR YOU'VE CAUSED EATS AT YOUR ASHES LIKE MICE EAT COCAINE. THOSE CHILDREN WON'T FORGET YOU.


End file.
